The South China Morning Post has an investigative reporter, Ian Young, who covers real estate in Vancouver, British Columbia, “with a rare kind of intensity and frankness,” The Vancouver Sun’s Douglas Todd reports.
When Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, in a recent trip to Hong Kong, claimed that immigrants and investors from mainland China aren’t driving up Vancouver property prices, Young dug up information in a story that ran a few days later suggesting that 75 percent of high-end metro Vancouver homes in one recent year were bought by mainland Chinese.
Vancouver is the second-most unaffordable city in the world, Todd says, citing figures from Demographia Research — only Hong Kong is more expensive.
Robertson “is not the only B.C. politician who is coy about how migration and foreign ownership affects Vancouver’s crisis of unaffordability, especially for young people,” Todd writes. “I’m not aware of any politician who is being open about it.” Source: blogs.vancouversun.com
